NVIDIA is taking all steps necessary to sell off older Ampere stocks. The newly launched GeForce RTX 4090 and 4080 are excellent GPUs but tend to fall short on the VFM front. Ironically, it’s the older 30 series cards grabbing market share meant for them. The RTX 3080 Ti, 3090, and 3090 Ti can be bought for a third of their MSRPs at resellers like eBay, pushing mainstream gamers away from Lovelace.
NVIDIA has permitted its partners to sell the top-end GA102 die as repurposed RTX 3070 Tis. The GA102 Ampere core powers the RTX 3080, 3080 Ti, 3090, and 3090 Ti, in order of partially to fully enabled cores. The GeForce RTX 3070 Ti leverages the GA104 die, the same as the 3070, but the latest shipments may sport the larger die.
These unique RTX 3070 Tis won’t come with updated features, and AIBs will accordingly disable some cores and memory controllers to meet the specifications. However, they may come with higher power and overclocking headroom, especially if paired with enthusiast-grade PCB and cooling.
According to Prohardver, board partners must place stickers on the packaging to indicate a hardware revision. Older boxes can be labeled the same way to minimize wastage.
Source: ProHardver
